In “The Autumn of the Multitaskers” in The Atlantic Monthly, Walter Kirn laments our buzzing era.
My hunch is that when we look back on it someday, at our juggling of electronic lives and the array of subtly different personas that each one encourages (we’re terse when texting, freewheeling on the phone, and in some middle state while e-mailing), the spectacle will appear as quaint and stylized as those scenes in old movies of stiff-backed lady operators, hair in bobby pins, rapidly swapping phone jacks from hole to hole as they connect Chicago to Miami, reporter to city desk, businessman to mistress. Such scenes were, for a time, cinematic shorthand for the frenzy of modern life, but then communications technology changed, and those operators lost their jobs.
To us.